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The impact of social status on the formation of collaborative ties and effort provision: An experimental study

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  • Horváth, Gergely
  • Jia, Mofei

Abstract

We study whether competition for social status induces higher effort provision and efficiency when individuals collaborate with their network neighbors. We consider a laboratory experiment in which individuals choose a costly collaborative effort and their network neighbors. They benefit from their neighbors’ effort and effort choices of direct neighbors are strategic complements. We introduce two types of social status in a 2 × 2 factorial design: (1) individuals receive monetary benefits for incoming links representing popularity; (2) they receive feedback on their relative payoff ranking within the group. We find that link benefits induce higher effort provision and strengthen the collaborative ties relative to the Baseline treatment without social status. In contrast, the ranking information induces lower effort as individuals start competing for higher ranking. Overall, we find that social status has no significant impact on the number of links in the network and the efficiency of collaboration in the group.

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  • Horváth, Gergely & Jia, Mofei, 2024. "The impact of social status on the formation of collaborative ties and effort provision: An experimental study," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 113(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:113:y:2024:i:c:s2214804324001356
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2024.102298
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Network formation; Collaboration; Social status; Efficiency; Experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation
    • D62 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Externalities
    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior

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